Copyright The New York Times
CINCINNATI — On Tuesday, the owner of the New York Jets, Woody Johnson, publicly lambasted his team’s quarterback. “If we can just complete a pass,” Johnson said. “It would look good.” On Saturday, that quarterback, Justin Fields, laid on the floor of a closet and cried. On Sunday morning, the Jets organization found out it lost one of its most beloved former players, Nick Mangold, at age 41. And on Sunday afternoon, Mason Taylor caught the game-tying touchdown — his father, Jason Taylor, was a teammate of Mangold’s. Moments later, Nick Folk kicked the PAT that became the game-winning point. Folk was Mangold’s teammate for seven years. “At the end,” Folk said, through tears. “He was there with us.” At various points in Cincinnati, the Jets trailed 17-3, 24-10, 31-16 and 38-24. It was 38-32 when Fields and the offense got the ball back with 6:50 remaining. The Jets just needed him to complete some passes, and he did — 23 yards to Arian Smith, 5 yards to Isaiah Williams, 9 yards to Isaiah Davis and 3 yards to Taylor. When they just needed one more, Fields pitched it back to Breece Hall, then stopped in his tracks to watch. Hall took it and ran toward the sideline. The defense swarmed him. Unfazed, he pump-faked, then flipped it to Taylor in the corner of the end zone, the tight end grabbing it over the head of a Bengals defender. The game-winning touchdown came on a trick play that the Jets had been working on for weeks. It was a touchdown that allowed Fields to walk off the field at the end of the game with a smile on his face, for the right reasons, for the first time in a Jets uniform. They won 39-38. Their celebration in the locker room met the moment. After a loss to the Miami Dolphins on Sept. 29, head coach Aaron Glenn’s angry screams were loud enough that they could be heard from the adjacent news-conference room. On Sunday, his voice carried again, this time in elation. Glenn, finally, got his first win as a head coach. In that moment, he celebrated his defense finally getting a stop to clinch a win — resilient after giving up 38 points. He exalted the offense for gaining 502 total yards, 254 of them on the ground. Jets vice chairman Christopher Johnson — Woody’s brother — gave him the game ball. Defensive tackle Harrison Phillips wrapped his arms around Glenn. Everyone cheered. “These guys, this staff, this team, gets criticized so much,” Glenn said. “I understand why. We’re 0-7. We brought a lot of it on ourselves. But I think a lot of (the criticism) was unwarranted. It is what it is. I’m just so happy for those guys, for the coaches. I also know we have a long way to go.” It might not seem like much to anyone else, a 1-7 team celebrating its first win in late-October. It doesn’t negate everything that happened before Sunday. This team is still a long way from making up for everything that went wrong to start the season. But the Jets needed this one. They earned it. And they felt it. “It meant a lot for me, emotionally, spiritually,” Fields said. “When I was on the field, I was damn near about to start crying.” In practice, Hall would get the ball from Fields (or Tyrod Taylor) on the trick play and he’d keep it himself, laughing on his way into the end zone. The halfback option pass is designed to give the running back the choice to run it or to throw it — and Hall liked to keep it. Most running backs don’t have the greatest throwing mechanics, but Hall brags about how many touchdown passes he threw in high school on trick plays. The Jets had been practicing the play for weeks, and it worked just about every time — whether Hall kept it or opted to throw to Mason Taylor, the receiver in Hall’s line of sight. The Jets had the ball at the 4-yard line at the two-minute warning, trailing 38-32. The deficit had been cut to six after Hall had scored on a 27-yard touchdown and the Jets converted a two-point conversion. Hall (18 carries for 133 yards and two touchdowns) was dominant all day — leading up to Sunday, he told Jets coaches that he wanted the ball more, and they smartly obliged — so it was logical that the defense would expect them to toss him the ball and run it in this situation. Glenn and offensive coordinator Tanner Engstrand wanted to capitalize on that. Fields came to the sideline at the two-minute warning, and Glenn brought up the idea of running this play they’d been practicing: How do you feel about it? “He’s like: ‘S—, Coach, it better work,’” Glenn said. “Well, good, let’s run it.” So they called it. Taylor motioned before the snap, acting as if he was readying to clear a path for Hall as a blocker. Instead, he broke toward the back right corner of the end zone as Fields tossed Hall the ball. Hall took it, ran around and positioned his body as if he was getting ready to keep it and run. The defense bit. Five defenders surrounded Hall. Taylor said after the game that he was open much earlier, but Hall couldn’t see him. “I honestly was confused,” Taylor said. “I thought he was throwing it away.” Instead, Hall had the idea to pump fake — and it worked. Bengals corner D.J. Turner had his back turned toward Hall, facing Taylor, and Hall knew he could throw it to a spot where Taylor could go and get it. Taylor scooped it over Turner’s head and got both feet inbounds to finish the catch. At first, from Hall’s angle, he wasn’t sure if Taylor caught it. So he turned to look at the crowd. “I looked at the Bengals fans,” he said, laughing. “And they were just silently staring at me.” To those on the Jets’ offense who had been practicing it for weeks, it was never a doubt. “We knew whenever it was going to be called, it was going to be a touchdown, honestly,” said wide receiver Tyler Johnson. And center Joe Tippmann: “I was excited to get that one off the sheet.” “I’m glad we called it,” Taylor said. “It was a great throw. I wouldn’t expect a running back to throw it like that.” From the sideline, defensive end Jermaine Johnson said he found himself shouting: “Ah s—! Ah s—!” as the play progressed. And then: “Hell yeah!” That moment, and the one that came after it, will linger through the Jets bye week. They were moments that salvaged a season that was spiraling into madness. “It just showed that this team, we have a lot of grit,” said cornerback Jarvis Brownlee. “We have a lot of talent on this team, we just gotta put it all together. Put it all together, you see what we can do — come out victorious.” To get there, to victory, the Jets had to overcome nearly four quarters worth of a startlingly ineffective defensive effort. The Bengals ran all over a defense that had played well the last two weeks. They’d reverted back to the form that made this look like one of the NFL’s worst defenses for the first five weeks: The tackling was poor, the pass rush was non-existent — even against a 40-year-old Joe Flacco, statuesque in the pocket — and mistakes on the back end, where they were without top cornerback Sauce Gardner, led to big plays. The Bengals averaged nearly eight yards per carry and ran for 181 yards and three touchdowns, one of them from Flacco on a QB sneak. In the second quarter, the Jets left rookie corner Azareye’h Thomas one-on-one with star receiver Tee Higgins, and Flacco made them pay on a 44-yard touchdown pass. The defense was wasting a stellar effort from the Jets offense — including Fields, who had his best game since Week 1. “It was a s— defensive performance,” Johnson said. “As a prideful room, it wasn’t a great performance at all. We’re just thankful (the offense) kept bailing us out. We knew on that final drive we had to step up.” The Jets took the lead on Hall’s pass to Taylor, but still needed the defense to keep Flacco from driving up the field and into field-goal range with 1:48 remaining. It wouldn’t have been the first time this season the Jets defense crumbled in a key moment, but this time the unit held. Glenn’s goal on Sunday was to not let Ja’Marr Chase or Higgins beat them — force anyone else to beat them, a strategy he said he learned years ago playing for Bill Belichick. On the final drive, Flacco completed his first pass for seven yards to Chase and then didn’t complete another. On fourth down at the 45-yard line, the Jets doubled Chase and Higgins and left Brownlee, the nickel corner, on an island with third receiver Andrei Iosivas. He jammed Iosivas at the line of scrimmage, and then the receiver ran a crossing route. Flacco threw it — and Brownlee jumped in and broke it up. Game over. “I’m a guy that makes plays,” said Brownlee, who the Jets acquired in a trade with the Titans on Sept. 23. “That’s what they brought me here for. I play hard, I play with a lot of effort. I knew the call was that we were doubling Chase and Tee Higgins, so I knew it was going to come down to me. They were giving me the same routes all game. So for me, it was just being patient.” It allowed Fields to take the final snap, in victory formation. Fields said that on Saturday, he curled into a ball and cried on the floor of his closet. He’s a man of faith — and it’s his faith that he leans on both in times of strife and in moments of valor. He’s had plenty of both of them in his football life, a superstar high school recruit, an Ohio State star and a first-round pick. Fields has had his lows as well, but this last week beat him down in a different kind of way. His confidence appeared shot the last couple of weeks — he seemed afraid to throw it, often holding onto the ball long enough to get hit or sacked. It was bad enough that Glenn benched him at halftime in Week 7 and held a competition last week to see who was going to start. On Tuesday, Johnson publicly chastised Fields for his poor play, practically putting the blame for their 0-7 start on his shoulders. If Tyrod Taylor hadn’t hurt his knee in practice, then Fields might not have started against the Bengals on Sunday. But he did. On Saturday, Fields was beside himself, “not because of the hardships, not because of the troubles. I felt like I was built to handle that, and I was put in place to handle this situation. But in that moment I was talking to my best friend about how hard it was not wavering faith-wise.” His sister and stepmom sent him a text that snapped him out of it, and then he prayed. “I was praying over and over and over again,” he said. “For just one win.” Whatever was holding him back for the last few weeks wasn’t there on Sunday. He was making plays in and out of the pocket, getting out on the move, throwing it downfield. His best throw might’ve been on a 34-yard completion to Tyler Johnson in the middle of the field in the second quarter, or the 15-yard touchdown he tossed to Johnson a few plays later. He completed 21 of 32 passes for 244 yards and a touchdown despite the absence of his top two wide receivers (Garrett Wilson and Josh Reynolds), playing well enough to earn a shot at another start when the Jets get back from the bye. It was an impressive enough performance to quiet some of the noise, even if much of it was coming from inside the house. “I’ve said this on a number of occasions that who he is as a person, his faith, the way he goes about his business, he was primed to be able to do something like this,” Glenn said. “He’s primed to be able to handle situations like this. And it’s so unfair to him, it really is, that he gets criticized so much. But I told him, being a high pick, being the quarterback in New York, criticism, responsibility, expectation, all of those things fall on you. Some of it is unwarranted, but we understand it. He’s a perfect person to handle everything that’s been thrown at him. He’s a special person.” Said Jermaine Johnson: “I told Justin every week: I believe in you, I have faith in you, go out there and play your brand of ball — and that’s what he did today. He never wavers. He has the ultimate faith and belief in himself.” Even if they won’t say it directly, it’s clear Johnson’s comments from earlier in the week struck a nerve — with Fields, and with his teammates. “He’s a guy that’s going to always work silently,” Tippmann said. “He’ll keep his head down and go to work. Whether that lit a fire in his chest or not, it was something that was sitting in the back of his head, and he wanted to prove what he can do.” Said guard John Simpson: “He handled it like a champion. I don’t care who said what, the guys in this room are what matters. Anybody that’s on that field, that’s what matters.” Fields referred to Johnson’s comments as “outside noise.” The noise in the Jets’ postgame celebration was so thunderous it carried into the nearby hallways at Paycor Stadium. What happened inside of it won’t be forgotten soon.
